


Empty as a Pocket

by FrancesHouseman



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Disguise, M/M, Sibling Incest, Stanford Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-22
Updated: 2014-09-22
Packaged: 2018-02-18 10:58:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2346041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrancesHouseman/pseuds/FrancesHouseman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean stumbles upon a way of checking up on Sam at Stanford without getting caught. He gets a bit closer than he had intended to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Empty as a Pocket

 

 

Sam has a girl on each arm and it's so out of character that Dean would laugh, if only he could. If only his yammering pulse and sweaty palms were not so distracting.

 

And maybe this is not so unusual for Sam these days: he's a very big boy and he can clearly take care of himself. It must be the way of things out here on the West Coast. Free lovin' in California. Apparently college changes a guy.

 

Sam's friends are so harmless that it's ridiculous. Dean scans them again anyway, out of habit. You can never be too careful and Dean Winchester has learned that the hard way. Then he orders a drink and assesses his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar. The face looking back at him belongs to a stranger. His eyes are blue and his hair is blond and close in tight curls. Dean's freckles are gone, until at least dinnertime tomorrow by Bobby's best guess. He's two inches shorter, has a tiny pink third nipple and barely needs to shave at all.

 

When Dean had ganked the warlock, and Bobby had convinced him that the curse was temporary, his first thought had been of Sam. Walking around in the body of a dead warlock is the perfect disguise for surreptitiously getting a look at how Sam's doing. He had only been in Marshall anyway, so eighty miles south was no distance at all. Of course, there might be other hunters that recognise this particular baby face but that would be really unlucky, even by Winchester standards.

 

Sam is wealthy here amidst his fellow students, in a way that he never has been before. He's surrounded by money, friends and love. There's an air of contentment about him that comes of being settled and secure, and he's so obvious about it that Dean wants to barf. Even if Sam wasn't surrounded by friends and looking well dressed and well fed, Dean would still know about the new-found riches of Sam's life because Sam _glows_. Dean can read it off him, easy as a psychic reads an aura. Sam has taken his preordained place. Sam stands to inherit the Earth.

 

Dean realises, too late, that he has been staring because Sam starts staring back. He must have mistaken the manner of Dean's interest because the looks he's sending are full-on flirtatious, which, well. Dean's learning new things about his baby brother. He really shouldn't flirt back. There are many sound and legitimate arguments for why Dean shouldn't flirt back. He knows them off by heart, back to front and inside out, and he flirts back anyway. It thrills him deep to his gut.

 

He never intended to get quite so close but Sam is like a magnet. Dean is just a loose screw caught in his field of influence. He scoots casually up the bar, closer to Sam but still blocked by one scantily clad blonde with long legs. Dean has to admit that, as human barriers go, she's one of the sweetest looking. She doesn't even notice him.

 

Sam carries on with his conversation. It's something inane sounding: a guy called Brady and his plans for Winter Break. Dean knows that Sam's attention is being seriously impaired because he feels it building too. They mirror each other's movements, shift-for-shift and drink-for-drink. Sam keeps glancing at Dean around the blonde and Dean keeps letting him just catch his eyes before looking away.

 

Flirting with Sam is risky in a way that's completely new and intoxicating. Dean's disguise could suddenly lift and reveal his true identity. The idea makes Dean's extremities pulse and tingle, as though his blood has thickened to sweet syrup, hot and heavy in his veins.

 

Bobby had been convinced that the curse was short term but not at all certain of its duration. Dean had kept on asking and eventually Bobby had said forty eight hours, but it had been a guess, albeit an educated one. Each breath could be the one that exposes Dean and he feels wide awake, completely in the moment.

 

He is acutely aware of his surroundings. It's similar to the way he feels when he's hunting something dangerous, but different. At first he can't pinpoint how it's different but then Sam spills a little tequila over his fingers and gives Dean a low smouldering _smirk_ as he catches it with his mouth. Dean isn't the hunter in this scenario, despite the disguise. He feels like prey. If he stays here and lets this happen then he will have to pay dearly, where as Sam will forget all about it in the morning.

 

Whatever happens tonight, Dean won't ever forget. He will carry it with him to the grave, and it might be the one memory that ends him. He knows that touching Sam, even once, will make it infinitely harder to live without him, and knows that he's doing it anyway. He has been desperately lonely and the temptation is just too great. Even if the curse lifts unexpectedly, he has already lost Sam. Dean has nothing left to lose.

 

 

Sam signals for more tequila and the bar tender salutes sharply and brings the bottle. They seem to know each other, Sam and the bar tender. Maybe Sam's here every other night, or maybe they're college buddies. Dean has his money on the bar to pay for the drinks before Sam can fish for his wallet.

 

The girls look 'round at Dean, noticing him for the first time, and, with the addition of one more shot glass, Dean is drinking with Sam and Sam's friends. Sam shrugs a smile at him and salts the back of his hand. Dean isn't short of money right now, quite the opposite in fact. He's got a nice thick wad of hustled cash stashed in the Impala a few blocks away. It doesn't stop him from feeling like the poor boy though. Dean's the pick-pocket at the party. He downs his shot with the others and relishes the acid bite of lime.

 

They do one more shot together before the girls finally take the hint and leave them alone, taking off for the dance floor.

 

Sam moves deliberately into Dean's space and presses their thighs together under the bar. It's their first moment of contact and Dean's lungs forget how to breathe. He's torn between pride that Sammy got so bold somewhere along the line, and the knowledge that he has never been so ready for anything in his life than he is for more contact with Sam.

 

Sam leads and Dean follows, before realising that they're headed towards the men's room. He stops Sam with a hand on his shoulder (bigger, firmer than it used to be) and gestures to a fire door with his head. He doesn't want Sam in a men's room, doesn't want to be in this club anymore. He wants Sam all to himself.

 

Sam looks suspicious for a moment but follows when Dean makes for the door. Dean can't help but smile when he feels a trickle of Holy Water on the back of his hand. He pretends not to have felt a thing and keeps his face angled away. He has already been tested with salt via the tequila slammers. Silver would probably burn, seeing as how Dean is temporarily the wrong shape, so he will have to distract Sam before he can get around to trying it.

 

Once they're outside it's neutral ground. Dean's lips tingle and his body hums. He lets Sam make the first move. He lets Sam kiss him, never having imagined that this could be a real situation that he might actually find himself in.

 

At first Dean wishes for his own lips. He learns Sam's mouth, even as he learns the mouth of the body he's in, and then he realises that there is a freedom to be found in this foreign form. He is free from Sam's judgement, so long as he looks like a stranger. He can kiss Sam exactly the way he wants to, cradle his face and pet at his hair. If Sam thinks that the blond guy he picked up is a sentimental soft-touch, well, nobody cares. Sam will write all this off as a-thing-with-a-guy-in-a-club anyway, and Dean thinks there must have been a few other-things with other-guys because Sam's hands, skilfully unbuttoning him, speak of experience.

 

When Sam's hand closes around his cock Dean whimpers into Sam's skin. He wishes again that he was in his true body but the thought is chased away by Sam's tongue, insistent against his own.

 

Sam strokes him and it's so good. Dean fumbles Sam's jeans and succeeds in freeing his cock, gloriously hard and ready, and then they're jerking each other and Dean just lets himself _feel_. The responsiveness of Sam's body has Dean blissing out on the feedback loop though, and it takes him too high, too quickly. He tries to pace himself but he's overwhelmed by _Sam_. Every sensation in this borrowed body is strange and new and Dean is rapidly losing control.

 

Allowing himself to get into this with Sam was so reckless that Dean may as well have jumped from an airplane or laid down arms before a werewolf. It's no longer about hunter and prey: Sam is a deity and Dean is his willing sacrifice. Dean is made sacred by Sam's touch, elysian in his final moments, filled with golden power and ascending to a higher plane; or at least that's how he feels as he tries to hold back, body trembling. He fights it, wants to remain vital and blessed, but he can't resist the relentless tug of Sam's big hand and his body pumps out rope after rope of come. Dean sobs his brother's name, once for every throb of his body, because he can't keep it inside. The last ' _Sam_ ' has an extra syllable tagged on, somewhere between the ultimate truth of Dean's existence and a hitch of breath.

 

Sam startles in Dean's grip and then he's coming too, moaning low like a shared secret that Dean will be hearing every night forever in his dreams.

 

They lean against each other and Dean feels the world begin to creep in, even hidden as he is in the confines of the doorway, safe for one moment longer against Sam's body. Guilt and regret start to well up inside and he fights them down, taking Sam's face in his clean hand and kissing him tenderly at the temple before it's too late. Sam pulls away and Dean very deliberately forces every finger to open up and let him go.

 

They tuck themselves away and straighten up. Sam looks relaxed and maybe a little amused at the ministrations of this strange tender guy who held him like the world was on fire and kissed his hair. He lets his hair flop forwards and it makes him look shy but Dean knows him better than that.

 

“Do you...” Sam breaks off and clears his throat. “We could do this again?”

 

Dean has an unerringly clear vision of a razor-edged sword, piercing through his own breastbone and sliding right into his heart. _No_ _Sam_ , he thinks. _We_ _can_ _never_ _do_ _this_ _again_.

 

“I mean, I'd like to.” Sam looks unsure.

 

Dean needs to say something. He forces his face into a parody of apologetic smiles. “I'm just passing through,” he says. “Staying with a friend on campus. Otherwise-”

 

“Yeah.” Sam looks down. “Well, nice to meet you...”

 

“Bobby,” Dean supplies. And what the hell is wrong with his brain? Bobby? _Really_?

 

Sam's eyebrows do a tiny dance in what he thinks is a private joke and he doesn't say anything else. He nods at Dean, friendly like they've shared a beer instead of jerking each other off in a doorway, and turns away. Thumping music and lights spill out into the alleyway when Sam opens the door to the club and Dean can only stand, rooted to the spot, as the portal to Sam's world swallows him up once again.

 

Sam is back where he should be. Sam stands to inherit the Earth

 

Dean drives. He drives until he's out of the city, until the outer edges of suburbia are finally in sight, until there are trees and he can see stars. Then he stops and strips off his shirt. He tries to find Sam's scent in the fabric but it's gone

 

 

****

 

 

Three thousand miles from reality, Cambridge Massachusetts, and Dean plays the part of a college student. The disguise should sit wrong but he's a professional liar and an expert in Sam, and it's Sam that Dean's pretending to be.

 

“Me an' this other guy Brady, we got summer internships with Blackstone,” he tells Kate and Paula, English majors, and imagines that he's looking up at them through floppy brown hair.

 

“That's so great!” Paula says it with great authority and genuine happiness for him. Dean wonders at her naivety. He's some guy she's only just met and she doesn't know him from Adam. They're so young, these girls. They shouldn't be drinking. Why are they here, drinking, these girls with big futures? Why are any of them here? Why is Dean here? He's nothing but flotsam, set adrift from the Great Ship Sam.

 

Philosophy aside, Dean is here to hunt a vengeful witch-doctor and so he leans in, widens his eyes for effect and asks, “So these rumours about the walking dead?”

 

The girls are eager to impart the gossip and Dean half listens. He takes mental notes on autopilot even as he thinks of Sam. Always there is a part of Dean's mind on his brother. He is never completely on the job anymore. He probably never will be again.

 

Sam's breath had been damp. He had moaned against Dean's neck and Dean had made him come.

 

Dean touches his neck and stands a little taller. He imagines that he's six foot four and that some day he's going be a High Court judge.

 

The girls go on with their spooky story, oblivious to Dean's daydreams. Kate's cute but Dean thinks he'll take Paula back to the motel. Not that it matters. None of it matters. Dean has somehow managed to step right outside of the real world and now he's like some poor Victorian kid at Christmas, always looking in the window. He'll tell Paula that he's hired the room so that they can be together, without interruptions from his imaginary roommate. It's the kind of thing Sam might actually do, Sam who's somewhere in California, busy inheriting the Earth.

 

Dean doesn't know how to be free, so tonight he'll be Sam instead. And tomorrow Dean will be someone else, someone who can live without Sam. One day he's going to be so good at pretending that even Sam himself wouldn't know the difference

**Author's Note:**

> The title's from a Paul Simon song. In fact, the whole story is written around the same song  
> But shhhh – don't tell Dean


End file.
